Letters from the absence #01

I’m writing you from the black corner of my bedroom, I have a ceiling full of cracks, a torn body covered in a green ointment, the window’s barred.

Time is crystallized in its opposite, I see myself reflected on the glass: a face burnt from within, the cheekbones pushing outwards, the eye thickening, the geographical idiom consumed by words.

I ask myself if in your land you managed to endure the burial, the cleaning of the body: I heard you, and your voice was broken. There’s a lake underneath my roots and I wish I could water the flowers of Suhail’s cemetery.

Sometimes I lay quietly on things, I tame silences and the carousel of void, I put on the skin you gave me in our city up the mountains, when walls were high and you were looking for an escape – you called me Holy Mary. The obsessive grasped your ankles, you danced into my room.

I haven’t been dancing in a long time, F. My hands move up the crest, to define the profile of the ravine I fell into – they call it a faille béante, but they don’t mean it: there’s no beatitude in this fault, there’s no fault, there’s a separation.

Cause, F., I am split.

I listen to Cissoko, Africa comes in though the cavities, trying to subvert the events. Sometimes I stare at the mountains, and I only see mute stones where once I used to observe marmots lied down on the brink of the lakes, at high altitude, sunbathing; Sometimes I stare at a puddle and I can’t see but rain: as if the world had been turned off, as if I had fallen outside of it, where all the impossible continues devouring the little bones and it can’t stop even when they’re all consumed.

This is what I mean, F., the consumed, the constant consuming of things. Your voice was calm even when you talked of him, the fallen one (I hold a vivid memory of him, a hug in the hospital’s aisles, a sweet desperation, an open laughter: he was the doctor who came from London. There was him and the second-born, with his angelic face. I wrote him long letters talking about Giuliano Mesa and taking photos of mute objects in the surrounding space).

Life is always this wait for contingencies, but we are in the absolute, F., we fell from the cemeteries in order to rest the branches besides the coffins, we get up and compose a night.

Do you remember when we celebrated in the paternal garden? When, along with sweet M., we spoilt ourselves with wine and cracks on the face? Do you remember the memory of the unnameable city? And your mother turning the mirror to avoid seeing me and your father with the Islamic skullcap asking for a wedding?

I moved, I dangle from the trellis of the house, and the house is a consolation for the interiors. This house from whence words fall in shapes of stones, people in shapes of words, words in shapes of things, events, objects. I saw a drop dangling from the ceiling and I thought: it’s a tear, I must throw myself out of the window.

They say it’s a missed symbolic passage, a harsh take on the reality of existence, they say it’s the dead matter shading my head and keeping me company during my morning strolls, which I take when the world is hidden, as the powerful star. From the streets I see the lights softly turning on, I see the windows turning into yellow and orange frames, an atmospheric tableau remade out of consolation.

Someone maybe still holds their bodies stuck within the inside of the insides.

I ask myself where the courage of the exit lies – I ask this to you, always righteous in this world, I climb with my paws your miniature arm, I listen to Jordi Savall, a court dance, the horses are missing, the stagecoaches are missing, our liquid words are not missing.

You said: they cleansed the body. It’s a sonata for solo violin. You said it had been excruciating, but I looked for your language just after the call. I was just trying to comfort you and say I’m always here, always with you.

He fell into beauty, you repeated three times – or maybe we said that simultaneously. To fall at the perfect time, to plummet into one’s own passion, like a musician who dies of heart attack after Beethoven’s No.9, at the pinnacle of desire, at the highest crest of the worlds. It was Scotland, and it was everything.

Once more, as always, I bent over the smooth surface of the animal, I become the mutinied beast who slowly stands up and reaches the medicines. I unwrap them one after the other, I swallow them one after the other, I’d like to spit out all of this poison, but if I did, I’d risk the straitjacket, the jackets of power, so I become a compromise in a life that life no longer is.

And yet still, F., when I look at the stars, I hold a memory of the August curtains, of the immeasurable starry cascade that fell from the sky above the Berici hills, I recall that night as a birth.

I gave birth to tiny planets from the mouth, I told you I miss you, you answered: I’m your orange man.